A key U.S. ally in a strategic region jails opposition members, breaks up protests with tear gas and violence, and declares a state of emergency. Sounds like Pakistan, right? But look a little further to the west, where a similar situation is emerging in the former Soviet republic of Georgia.
The crisis in Georgia reached a head last week, when government riot police beat protesters in the cobbled streets of the picturesque capital, Tbilisi, and shut down two pro-opposition television stations. At 1 a.m. on Thursday morning, the government announced a state of emergency that would last for 15 days.
A U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of State, Matthew Bryza, went to Georgia and called for the immediate lifting of the state of emergency and the reopening of two pro-opposition television stations that the government took off the air.
But this was probably too little, and definitely too late. The protests have fed off popular dissatisfaction with President Mikheil Saakashvili's government -- dissatisfaction that has slowly grown since he took power after the 2003 Rose Revolution and that the U.S., by far Georgia's closest ally, has encouraged the government to ignore.
Of course, the situation in Georgia is nowhere near as dire as in Pakistan: Georgia doesn't have nuclear weapons, is not in danger of falling into the hands of al Qaeda supporters, and has jailed only a fraction of the dissidents that Pakistan has. But the parallel illustrates that what's going on in Pakistan is not necessarily a unique situation, but represents to some degree a dangerous pattern that can emerge when the most powerful country in the world decides that its interests rely on the survival of a particular government. And the crisis in Georgia, if it continues to fester, could result in strategic blowback for the U.S. that would be disastrous in the long term.
At the end of September, a former defense minister, Irakli Okruashvili, announced that he was forming an opposition party and accused Saakashvili of corruption and conspiring to murder another opposition figure. Two days later Okruashvili was arrested, and two weeks after that was released and mysteriously recanted his allegations against Saakashvili. He has since re-recanted the allegations, and is now in Germany -- either for medical treatment or because he will be arrested if he comes back to Georgia, depending on whom you ask. The entire episode should have been deeply troubling to anyone who cared about democracy, but it didn't seem to bother too many people in Washington.
"I would call it a bump in the road. You're always going to have, in a healthy democracy, scandals of some sort," one U.S. government official told me before the violence of Nov. 7. "Georgia is a young country without a lot of experience in these matters and they're probably going to make mistakes. They have traditions that aren't the best in the world to fall back on and they may overreact. But I can tell you that no one here is wringing their hands over how Okruashvili was treated. We're paying attention to it, we're watching how things develop, but from our point of view, so far so good."
For the most part, the Georgian government deserves U.S. support. In the four years since the Rose Revolution, it has made remarkable strides in combating corruption (in the last Transparency International rankings, it was the 79th most corrupt country in the world -- up from 8th just three years ago). And the opposition, too, is of no great distinction; one friend in Georgia called it "a ragtag group of fringe, irrelevant idiots." It's made up mainly of two main camps: some Rose Revolution leaders who fell out of favor with Saakashvili and are now trying to get their piece of the pie, and a few officials from the deeply corrupt former government of Edvard Shervanadze.
There is social discontent for them to tap into, however. Saakashvili's lofty rhetoric has raised expectations that Georgia's economy will progress more rapidly than is possible. And the reforms have costs -- a much-ballyhooed reform of the highway police, for example, eliminated the country's legendary highway bribery almost overnight. But it also left 11,000 police out of jobs.
One of the main demands of the protesters has been to hold parliamentary elections next spring, rather than in the fall, as Saakashvili wants. In a "compromise," Saakashvili announced on Thursday that he would hold snap presidential elections in January -- something no one was demanding, and which even Saakashvili admitted was a move to shore up his authority.
"As the leader of this country, I need your unequivocal mandate to tackle all the foreign threats, to tackle all types of pressure on Georgia, to tackle attempts at annexing Georgian territory, to tackle plans directed towards destabilizing Georgia," he said in a live televised speech to the nation. His campaign, no doubt, will be made easier by the fact that now only pro-government television is allowed to broadcast.
The U.S., bizarrely, praised this move. "The United States welcomes the Georgian Government's decision to hold early presidential elections," said State Department spokesman Sean McCormick, in a statement issued immediately after Saakashvili's announcement.
But ever since Saakashvili took power, he has been unable to do any wrong in Washington's eyes. Bush visited Tbilisi in 2005 and made a joint appearance with Saakashvili in front of a crowd of 150,000. "I am proud to stand beside a president who has shown such spirit, determination, and leadership in the cause of freedom," Bush said of Saakashvili. "There are good guys and bad guys, and Saakashvili is one of the good guys," another U.S. official told me.
Tbilisi has been repaying Washington's favor, with interest. It has implemented painful economic and social reforms that have made Georgia the World Bank's top reforming country. And it is now the third-largest contributor of troops to Iraq -- fully one-fourth of Georgia's armed forces are now serving there.
Saakashvili's goal is to enlist Washington's support for Georgia's number one foreign policy priority: admission into NATO, which Tbilisi believes will be the only guarantee against Russian aggression against Georgia. Russia now backs two separatist regions of Georgia, and there is a widespread hatred of Russia in Georgia. (Saakashvili has been trying to take advantage of this by repeatedly alleging that the opposition is sponsored by Russia, but has not provided any convincing evidence to back that up.)
"Unfortunately, the only leverage that still exists on my government is Washington. No one else has any leverage on them," said Tinatin Khidasheli, an opposition party official who traveled earlier this month to Washington last week to try to enlist U.S. support for the opposition.
Part of the blame goes to Saakashvili, but part to the U.S., she told me. "President Bush has put too much emphasis on Georgian politics, this is the only foreign policy victory he's had," she said "In every speech he makes in eastern and central Europe he talks about Georgia as a model, it's a big stake and a big responsibility for such a small country to be a model for democracy in the rest of the world." That has made the U.S. unwilling to admit to Georgia's failings, she said -- something that European capitals and foreign non-governmental organizations have been warning for some time.
"The situation there remains fragile, and there are warning signs of backsliding on human rights," Human Rights Watch's Holly Carter wrote last year in advance of a meeting between Bush and Saakashvili.
The first official acknowledged that Washington was more willing to give Saakashvili the benefit of the doubt than its European allies, who have raised concerns even before this crisis about a variety of human rights issues, Saakashvili's often over-the-top anti-Russian rhetoric, and his concentration of power. "The concern has been, how is this read elsewhere, in Paris or Berlin," the official said. "If Georgia wants to sell its case with some of the allies, who are far more skeptical compared to us, then they have to make progress on these areas -- they can't just talk about it, they have to do it."
But it may be too late for that now, and the U.S. isn't the only country that gets a say in whether Georgia joins NATO. NATO Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer said after the violence that the government's actions were "not in line with Euro-Atlantic values." But the U.S. is holding firm. Bryza suggested U.S. support for Georgia's membership had not wavered. "What happened on Nov. 7 does not affect our calculations of what is in the United States' national interest and what is a history of NATO accepting countries that fulfill accession criteria," he said while in Georgia. "So therefore, there would be no shift in our policy." Why start now?
